Design and Static Analysis of Mono Composite Leaf Spring Made of Various Types of Composite Materials Using Finite Element Method

Abstract

In this study design and static analysis of mono composite leaf spring are performed in comparison to the existing structural steel leaf spring. The basic idea behind this work is to replace the existing structural steel leaf spring with composite materials. In this work, three different kinds of composite materials are taken such as laminated Carbon/Epoxy, Boron/Aluminum, and Carbon/Epoxy (Non-Laminated) with the same thickness, width, and load-carrying capacity. The main investigation of the study is to reduce the weight of existing structural steel leaf spring while upholding its strength. This study seeks to address, improving load-carrying capacity, and designing less stressed and lightweight mono composite leaf spring. In this study, 60% fiber volume fraction and 40% matrix volume fraction are taken. In present work total deflection and equivalent von-misses stresses induced in the different kinds of mono composite leaf spring are compared with total deflection and equivalent von-misses stresses of conventional structural steel leaf spring. For analysis purposes, Ansys workbench 19.2 is used and for modeling of composite leaf spring, NX 10 (Unigraphics) is used. Finally, from the static analysis results, it has been observed that the newly designed composite leaf spring made of Carbon/Epoxy (Non-Laminated) has better performance than the existing conventional structural steel leaf spring.